William Wardill
The Home Place
Several weeks ago people gathered for the funeral of my wife’s nephew. He had ended his own life to avoid the relentless agony of terminal cancer. He was 53 years old and an only child, the third generation of his family to live on the home place. Days later, I sat in my favourite chair in a warm room, hugging myself because I felt cold enough to shiver. The feeling was familiar. It is the way my body grieves.
My wife’s family name is Besler, a name prominent among the German settlers that Catherine the Great of Russia brought to the Ukraine. Her parents, Alfred and Anna, fled with their young son Walter to Saskatchewan from Stalinist Russia before the dust-filled disaster of the Dirty Thirties began.
I think I first saw the home place in the summer of 1950. In a time when the euphoria of a war fought and won still lingered, the home place was a memorial to the years between the two great wars. There was a house and a few other buildings, all unpainted, sun-bleached and pitted by the sand storms of the past. There was an empty stable for the horses and cows that were banished from the farmyard only a few years before. There was a garage for one half-ton truck.
In 1950, there were no telephone or power lines reaching the home place. The nearest telephone was across the river in Estuary. Although most of its former population was gone, there was still a general store there and grain elevators and a bulk fuel dealer. There were still trains running on the Swift Current-Bassano line, where Empress, Alberta, had the biggest CPR rail yards west of Winnipeg and people there still remembered when it was planned to have eight railway branches passing through their town.
When Alfred and Anna retired to the town of Leader, Walter stayed on the home place. He married; his son Ronald was born. He expanded his land holdings, added to the buildings on the home place, filling them with equipment and machinery. He was energetic, inventive and a master builder and organizer. Those were the happy years. I remember the fishing trips when we went down to the river with a boat he had built. My memory of those years is idyllic rather than accurate. The sun always shone; the breeze was always gentle; the river was never in flood.
When it was time for their son Ronald to go to school Walter and Ruth Besler made a home in Leader. Much too soon, Ruth died of cancer. Then Walter became a victim of Parkinson’s Disease. Ronald became the only one to work on the home place. And then cancer ended his life. The tragedy of one farm family is over.
I wish I could have intervened to rewrite the realities of their lives, but nobody has that God-like power. When I am in my favourite chair, the tragic history of people I knew and loved expands into a concern for the suffering and death of millions of families trapped in the struggles between those who are powerful and evil. Honesty and good will in international leadership could rescue them. I can’t see it happening.
I would like to go back to the time when people didn’t carry telephones in their pockets, when they went to town on Saturday night to shop and to have face-to-face meetings with friends. I would like to go back to the hope-filled time when the nations came together to build new pathways to a permanent peace.
